# BrainVis: Exploring the Bridge between Brain and Visual Signals via Image Reconstruction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.14871 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.14871/

## Key facts

- Cited by 30 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Dec 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Neural Discrete Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00937/) (2017)
- [BLIP: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training for Unified Vision-Language Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12086/) (2022)
- [Improved Techniques for Training GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03498/) (2016)
- [Seeing Beyond the Brain: Conditional Diffusion Model with Sparse Masked Modeling for Vision Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06956/) (2022)
- [LAFITE: Towards Language-Free Training for Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13792/) (2021)
- [Natural scene reconstruction from fMRI signals using generative latent diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05334/) (2023)
- [Deep Neural Networks Reveal a Gradient in the Complexity of Neural Representations across the Brain's Ventral Visual Pathway](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.6422/) (2014)
- [Mind Reader: Reconstructing complex images from brain activities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01769/) (2022)
- [MOABB: Trustworthy algorithm benchmarking for BCIs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06427/) (2018)
- [Deep Learning Human Mind for Automated Visual Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.00344/) (2016)
- [From voxels to pixels and back: Self-supervision in natural-image reconstruction from fMRI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.02431/) (2019)
- [Neural Encoding and Decoding with Deep Learning for Dynamic Natural Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03425/) (2016)
- [DreamDiffusion: Generating High-Quality Images from Brain EEG Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16934/) (2023)
- [Decoding Brain Representations by Multimodal Learning of Neural Activity and Visual Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.10974/) (2018)
- [MindDiffuser: Controlled Image Reconstruction from Human Brain Activity with Semantic and Structural Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04249/) (2023)
- [TimeMAE: Self-Supervised Representations of Time Series with Decoupled Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00320/) (2023)
- [Reconstructing Perceptive Images from Brain Activity by Shape-Semantic GAN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.12083/) (2021)
- [EEG2IMAGE: Image Reconstruction from EEG Brain Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10121/) (2023)
- [Towards Voice Reconstruction from EEG during Imagined Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.07173/) (2023)
- [Learning Robust Deep Visual Representations from EEG Brain Recordings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16532/) (2023)
- [Improving visual image reconstruction from human brain activity using latent diffusion models via multiple decoded inputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11536/) (2023)
- [EEG-based Auditory Attention Decoding: Towards Neuro-Steered Hearing Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.04569/) (2020)
- [Correct block-design experiments mitigate temporal correlation bias in EEG classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.03849/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [Controllable Generation with Text-to-Image Diffusion Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04279/) (2024)
- [ClassDiffusion: More Aligned Personalization Tuning with Explicit Class Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17532/) (2024)
- [HiddenGuard: Fine-Grained Safe Generation with Specialized Representation Router](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02684/) (2024)
- [DP-IQA: Utilizing Diffusion Prior for Blind Image Quality Assessment in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19996/) (2024)
- [VistaWise: Building Cost-Effective Agent with Cross-Modal Knowledge Graph for Minecraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18722/) (2025)
- [Guess What I Think: Streamlined EEG-to-Image Generation with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02780/) (2024)
- [NECOMIMI: Neural-Cognitive Multimodal EEG-informed Image Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00712/) (2024)
- [ContextNav: Towards Agentic Multimodal In-Context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.04560/) (2025)
- [WaMo: Wavelet-Enhanced Multi-Frequency Trajectory Analysis for Fine-Grained Text-Motion Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03343/) (2025)
- [Gated Differentiable Working Memory for Long-Context Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12906/) (2026)
- [VideoStir: Understanding Long Videos via Spatio-Temporally Structured and Intent-Aware RAG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.05418/) (2026)
- [ViEEG: Hierarchical Visual Neural Representation for EEG Brain Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12408/) (2025)
- [TokenSwap: Backdoor Attack on the Compositional Understanding of Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.24566/) (2025)
- [Test-Time Attention Purification for Backdoored Large Vision Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12989/) (2026)
- [Foundation Models for Cross-Domain EEG Analysis Application: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15716/) (2025)
- [Learning Brain Representation with Hierarchical Visual Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.07495/) (2026)
- [BrainDecoder: Style-Based Visual Decoding of EEG Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05279/) (2024)
- [Unveiling Deep Semantic Uncertainty Perception for Language-Anchored Multi-modal Vision-Brain Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.04078/) (2025)
- [SYNAPSE: Synergizing an Adapter and Finetuning for High-Fidelity EEG Synthesis from a CLIP-Aligned Encoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17547/) (2025)
- [Multi-Level Bidirectional Biomimetic Learning for EEG-Based Visual Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.04680/) (2026)
- [Interpretable EEG-to-Image Generation with Semantic Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.07157/) (2025)
- [CATVis: Context-Aware Thought Visualization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.11522/) (2025)
- [Uni-Neur2Img: Unified Neural Signal-Guided Image Generation, Editing, and Stylization via Diffusion Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.18635/) (2025)
- [MindPilot: Closed-loop Visual Stimulation Optimization for Brain Modulation with EEG-guided Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.10552/) (2026)
- [Brain3D: EEG-to-3D Decoding of Visual Representations via Multimodal Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08068/) (2026)
- [Structure-Guided Diffusion Model for EEG-Based Visual Cognition Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.22649/) (2026)
- [Neural Visual Decoding via Cognitive guided Adaptive Blurring and Information Constrained Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.16418/) (2026)
- [MindAU: EEG-Conditioned Facial Action Unit Editing via Dual-Stream Manifold Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00410/) (2026)
- [Lost in Visual Translation: A VLM-Assisted Perceptual-Semantic Coherence Framework for EEG-to-Image Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.12364/) (2026)
- [V-DEAL: Diagnosing Video Safety De-Calibration as an Understanding-Refusal Coupling Failure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.21151/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Analyzing and reconstructing visual stimuli from brain signals effectively advances the understanding of human visual system. However, the EEG signals are complex and contain significant noise. This leads to substantial limitations in existing works of visual stimuli reconstruction from EEG, such as difficulties in aligning EEG embeddings with the fine-grained semantic information and a heavy reliance on additional large self-collected dataset for training. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach called BrainVis. Firstly, we divide the EEG signals into various units and apply a self-supervised approach on them to obtain EEG time-domain features, in an attempt to ease the training difficulty. Additionally, we also propose to utilize the frequency-domain features to enhance the EEG representations. Then, we simultaneously align EEG time-frequency embeddings with the interpolation of the coarse and fine-grained semantics in the CLIP space, to highlight the primary visual components and reduce the cross-modal alignment difficulty. Finally, we adopt the cascaded diffusion models to reconstruct images. Using only 10% training data of the previous work, our proposed BrainVis outperforms state of the arts in both semantic fidelity reconstruction and generation quality. The code is available at https://github.com/RomGai/BrainVis.